In many ways, Stuck Between Stations is the quintessential American festival movie. The low-budget indie feels like a deeply personal work, teetering on the edge of collapsing into overwrought melodrama but always able to get back on track. Cowriter and coproducer Sam Rosen stars as Casper, a young man who returns to his Minneapolis home for his father’s funeral. At a bar he bumps into his childhood crush, Rebecca (Zoe Lister-Jones), a grad student whose life is being turned upside down, as the head of her department just discovered that Zoe has been having an affair with her husband. Casper gets into a fight with Rebecca’s friends, then ends up spending the rest of the very long night with her as they wander through Minneapolis visiting a bizarre circus, breaking into a house, and talking openly and honestly about their lives, revealing only little bits at a time. It takes a while to warm up to the two main characters, but once director and coproducer Brady Kiernan gets things rolling, Stuck Between Stations becomes a compelling, moving ride. To keep the protagonists on-screen the whole way, Kiernan, in his feature-length debut, employs split screens whenever the two are physically separated, a conceit that ends up working. The film also stars Michael Imperioli as Rebecca’s mentor/lover and Josh Hartnett as the leader of a late-night partying bike crew. The title comes from a 2006 song by the then-Minneapolis-based band the Hold Steady in which Craig Finn sings, “Boys and girls in America, they have such a sad time together.” Audiences will end up not having a sad time together watching Stuck Between Stations.